Video games and movies have enjoyed a close relationship ever since the late 1970s. After all, what better way to promote a movie to young audiences than to let them enjoy an interactive version of it? On the flip side, it’s a lot easier to sell a game when it comes branded with an already popular IP.
There are many, many failures in licensed games, though a few have succeeded. So, here are five of the best and worst cinematic console catastrophes from the last four decades of gaming
Best: LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga (2022)
This list wouldn’t be complete without a nod to Traveller’s Tales’ huge catalogue of LEGO games, encompassing movies from Harry Potter, The Lord of the Rings, Indiana Jones and many more. But it’s Star Wars where they’ve really excelled, beginning with the 2005 original on PlayStation 2, Xbox, and GameCube.
2022’s The Skywalker Saga is the ultimate realization of that dream, letting you play from the beginning of The Phantom Menace right up until the end of The Rise of Skywalker. There are a ridiculous amount of playable characters, some excellent jokes, and the whole package just overflows with love for Star Wars.
Worst: Aliens: Colonial Marines (2013)
Given how many games not-so-subtly pinch design elements from James Cameron’s 1984 sci-fi classic Aliens you’d expect a first-person shooter directly based on the movie to be an easy home run. Nope. Colonial Marines was so bad it launched a class action lawsuit after the marketing materials flagrantly misrepresented the actual game.
Developer Gearbox Software was being paid by Sega to develop Colonial Marines, but was accused of siphoning that money off to make their own Borderlands and Duke Nukem Forever titles. When Sega found out what their money was being used for they went ballistic and temporarily canceled the game.
Development hell ensued, and what eventually limped onto shelves in 2013 was an embarrassment to all involved and an enduring stain on the Alien IP.
Best: Alien: Isolation (2014)
Just one year later Creative Assembly would redeem Alien games with perhaps the single most terrifying survival horror game ever released. This positions itself as a sequel to the original 1979 Alien, with you stepping into the retrofuturistic boots of Amanda Ripley, Ellen Ripley’s daughter, as she explores a mysteriously deserted space station.
Spoiler alert, the missing crew aren’t just out for coffee.
Very soon you’re in a terrifying cat-and-mouse situation with a singular Xenomorph, which will have your heart thumping in your chest and the controller slipping through sweaty palms. The only downside is that for many it proved too scary and low sales meant we never got a sequel.
Worst: Fight Club (2004)
David Fincher’s seminal 1999 movie Fight Club shouldn’t have ever been a video game. Despite the title there are few actual “Fight Club” scenes in the film, though this is what developer Genuine Games seized on when the unlikely license fell into their lap.
The result is a godawful Tekken clone that makes a mockery of the movie and book’s themes. The cherries on top are the bizarre inclusion of Abraham Lincoln and Fred Durst as unlockable characters, the latter due to a contractual clause that any game featuring Limp Bizkit music must include Durst as a playable character.
Best: Friday the 13th: The Game (2017)
Turning a slasher movie into a game is a tough nut to crack. Playing as a squishy teen on the run from a killer is frustrating, though controlling the killer themself just feels a bit icky. But Illfonic nailed it with their incredible asymmetric multiplayer title that lets you both play hunted and hunter.
Up to eight people can play at once, with one randomly chosen to be Jason. The counsellor characters have objectives to complete and escape, while Jason must hunt them down. We love it, though the sad wrinkle is that legal complications mean the game will be delisted from sale at the end of 2023, though will remain playable until the end of 2024. Enjoy Crystal Lake while you can!
Worst: Spider-Man 2 (2004)
Put down your pitchforks, it’s not that Spider-Man 2. Treyarch’s open-world adventure on PlayStation 2, GameCube and Xbox very nearly made this list as one of the best licensed games, but we’re talking about its ugly sister: the truly dreadful PC game of the game name.
While still titled Spider-Man 2 (and having the same box art), the PC game is entirely different from its console siblings. Developed by short-lived studio The Fizz Factor (who?) this ditches open-world web-slinging in favor of a contextual mouse-based control system that dumbs the gameplay down to rock-bottom levels.
On release, many PC players understandably thought they were purchasing a port of the excellent console game, though after playing even a few minutes of this dreck they were howling in righteous anger and demanding refunds.
Best: Mad Max (2015)
Mad Max was released to a shrug from the gaming community. Reviews were positive but not glowing and it had the misfortune of being released on the same day as Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain. But the stature of this post-apocalyptic adventure has only risen over the years.
Like many of the best licensed games this doesn’t directly adapt a movie, but tells a new story based on them. Developer Avalanche Software clearly understands the property: there’s a constant hunt for gasoline, Max will eat dog food and maggots to replenish his health, and throughout you’re tinkering with your V8 deathmobile, the Magnum Opus.
Exploring the sandy remains of the old world is amazing, the car combat is fun, and the graphics are still impressive. This is now usually a couple of bucks on Steam, so if you want a fun ride through the end of the world, check it out.
Worst: The Lord of the Rings: Gollum (2023)
The Lord of the Rings is bursting with heroic figures facing impossible odds and is obviously fertile territory for video games. So heads were scratched when developers Daedalic Entertainment announced they were making a game where you play as the cowardly and feebly Gollum.
The end result was somehow worse than every dire pre-release prediction. The graphics were hideous, the stealth system busted, and the game teeming with bugs. It promptly received some of the worst reviews of the generation, and Daedalic released a gloomy statement saying they were now leaving game development to focus on publishing.
This was later compounded by reports of nightmarish working hours and underpaid staff, and that Daedalic’s apology was apparently generated by ChatGPT. And by the way, if you’re nitpicking that Gollum is based on the books rather than the movies, it takes such obvious visual and aesthetic inspiration from Peter Jackson’s trilogy that we feel it’s worthy of inclusion here.
Best: GoldenEye 007 (1997)
C’mon, you knew this would be on here. Rare’s 24-carat first-person-shooter masterpiece is commonly listed among the great games of all time and adapts Pierce Brosnan’s 1995 James Bond debut of the same name so well it’s generally considered better than the movie.
It broke new ground in atmospheric objective-based single-player design, moving away from the maze-like abstraction of Doom in favor of realism, together with a focus on sneaking and stealth rather than going in guns blazing. All that, combined with a still-beloved multiplayer mode has cemented it as one of the greatest video games of all time. What more needs to be said?
Worst: E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982)
Aka the game so bad it almost killed off the entire gaming industry. Despite being 41 years old Atari’s E.T. remains the byword for awful video games and was thrown together by a lone programmer to hit an impossibly tight holiday season deadline. The end result was so fundamentally unplayable hundreds of thousands of customers returned it to stores and Atari was left with truckloads of unsold copies.
With no chance of selling them, they cut their losses and, famously, chose to crush and bury thousands of copies of E.T. in a landfill outside Alamogordo, New Mexico. E.T. is widely considered to have contributed to the 1983 video game industry crash and ultimately shifted the balance of power in video games from the United States to Japan.
It is also mind-blowingly terrible.